Welcome To Rituals!

I'm very excited that my project has (finally) made it on to Handmade Network! Rituals kind of started on stream, subbing for the Handmade Dev show, so to have it on handmade.network feels natural.

At this point, the game itself is very much in development, with almost no gameplay to speak of. The plan is to build a game much like a procedurally-generated The Legend of Zelda, but with survival and production/automation aspects to vary and expand gameplay while giving longevity to individual sessions. I don't like discussing design specifics yet because much of the game's planned design is likely to change as development continues. Too, I don't like trying to provide a complete roadmap because immediate decisions influence subsequent ones; however, I can say for sure the finished project will feature at least these things:

I'm sure I'll elaborate on all of these in future blog posts as time goes on (or, when I get to working on them).

The game is free and open source, currently under the MIT license. I'm not entirely sure whether that's the correctly license to go with; I'd like people to be able to use code from the project freely, without adding a license file (something you're supposed to do with MIT), while still protecting the project as a whole. It might be "correct" to license the engine parts of the game under something lighter (wtfpl? zlib?) and the game components under something more restrictive (LGPL?), while the art and other non-source goes under a third license, probably a Creative Commons one? I'll probably never run into problems, and I'll likely spin off some of the more useful code into stb-style libraries anyway, but I think it's worth thinking about. In the end though: almost all of the code in the game will be visible and usable by others.

As the source code for the game is available, it's easy to build it yourself. The latest source comes with the required libraries on Windows, so all you have to do is double click on the make.bat file (if you have Visual Studio 2015 installed.) There's a makefile that works on Linux (and on macOS if you add -framework opengl to the compiler options) too. If it makes sense to, I'll create and upload a Windows build weekly, too.

If it wasn't clear from the second sentence, I stream the development of Rituals at my twitch channel. I'm not dedicated to writing all the code on stream (and I don't think twitch has saved any of the archived ones), but I largely save the "big things" for the stream, if possible. My schedule isn't very consistent (there are weeks when I'm not awake at my streaming time, which makes it difficult), but my goal is 2PM Pacific (9PM UTC), every day except Monday. Rituals isn't designed to be an educational project, but I try to write simple code and explain what I'm doing for the audience. At some point, I plan on doing a complete code review of the game, where I go through how everything works on video, doing demonstrations of (to the best of my memory) what it took to get to that point.

This project is supported through my Patreon (or, I just added a PayPal donation button). I have a couple goals listed: a YouTube channel and a dedicated website. It'd be really cool to make those, so if you like the project, please consider becoming a patron!